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One of the things on my bucket list was to go to Italy and go to Pompeii which I find fascinating. Fat chance I’m getting there any time soon as having cancer has a point of killing you financially. I really hope to go there though. One day.

So Buba bought me and the kids tickets today to go to the Royal Ontario Museum to see their Pompeii Exhibit. It was really neat but difficult to handle because Frack was in charge of pushing my wheelchair around and he is nuts. I barely had time to read the information cards before he would whip me around to see something else. Boys! I tell you. A different breed. He wanted to know what all the plaster casts were about but was too impatient to read about it himself. Lazy bum. So I would speed read the excerpts and tell him a story about it in hopes that he would remember something about what he saw. It was hard work!

Here are the models of how the archeologists painstakingly found the bodies buried under the ash.

Very hot ash and pumice bury the victim early in the eruption of 79.

The body lies buried underground.

The body slowly decays creating a hollow, still including skeletal remains.

Archeologists fill the hollow with plaster.

The plaster hardens. The cast of the body is carefully excavated. The ash is chipped off.

There was a dog tied to his leash and a family who hid in their wine cellar and ran for it when they thought the coast was clear (briefly of no ash). Unfortunately for all 13 of them from that cellar, they were caught running through their garden and died of a flash of intense heat from the volcano.

Apparently there were approximately 12,000 inhabitants in Pompeii at the time of the eruption, but they only found about 1,550 bodies. There is still 1/3 of Pompeii that needs to be excavated near the shoreline. Wonder if and how many escaped by sea? I imagine running in a metre of ash after a couple of hours after the first mushroom volcanic explosion would have been close to impossible. By the next day Pompeii was buried under 4 metres of ash. As big as my house. From what I understand wouldn’t most of the people die right away from the initial gas explosion? No oxygen. Wouldn’t they have been cooked from the immense heat? How about being pelted by huge rocks dropping from the sky as they were trying to run to get on a ship by the sea?

Gotta go see the real Pompeii for myself and blog it!
There were lots of beautiful Roman frescos and marble statues/busts to see, but this exhibit is only open in Toronto until Jan 3, so your days are numbered if you want to go. But buy your tickets online before they are sold out and skip the lines.

I lost my cell phone and it’s dead. I know it’s in the house somewhere but I can’t find it. So if you are trying to message me, it ain’t happening. I hope this isn’t like the time I lost my engagement/wedding rings. It took me over 8 years to eventually find them.

My iPhone 6 will be ancient history if I don’t find it in 8 years. Sigh.

When I got to the ROM and requested a wheelchair, all 10 were out. The guy at the coat check told me to leave my number and they would call me when one was available. Ha! No phone.

Had to go back every once in a while to see if someone returned a wheelchair. Eventually I got one.